Three digit binary clock

Here’s a three digit binary clock that [Viktor] designed. It uses a multiplexed display to drive one digit at a time with a PIC 16F628A. The video after the break shows it ticking away, display hours, minutes, and seconds in blue LEDs. You may be wondering why those LEDs are not flush to the board? [Viktor] took the project one step further than most binary clock projects, designing a PCB to fit into the enclosure of an old laptop PSU and then having the board manufactured. With options like DorkbotPDX groups orders its has become quite inexpensive to do this and it’s really good practice for when you need to design a highly complicated board for that super-fantastic project of the future.

Actually, the top set of six LEDs (at the bottom in HaD’s image) is the seconds, the next row of six is the minutes, and the row of five is hours. The lonely one off to the side seems to be a power-on indicator (which seems a bit redundant, but whatever…)

I have been thinking about doing something like this for a while. Personally I would use 6 LEDs for the hours (using BCD, the top 2 LEDs would count 0 – 1 – 2 and the bottom 4 LEDs would count 0 – 9, giving 0 to 24 hour display).

Same idea using 7 LEDs for the minutes.

For the seconds, it seems like a waste of resources to display those, so I would just use a single LED flashing @ 1Hz to give some feeling of movement to the design.

I have thought about getting an “L” shape, brushed steel housing laser cut to mount it in to make a realy cool project.

thing is, you can buy stuff like that for a few ££ off ebay, so it makes me wonder “what is the point?!”.

Btw, those decoupling caps are f-in huge. Have a look at aluminium or Tantalum surface mount for future projects.

@holly_smoke: you could use that arrangement, but then again it wouldn’t be a binary clock, right? ;)

as for your question “what’s the point?!”, well, the point is having fun hacking the day away in a creative manner. Sure you could save the money (and time) by buying something from eBay, but it wouldn’t be nearly as fun!

Nicely done.
The Powers of 2® from Anelace (www.anelace.com) uses a Microchip controller at its heart. It lets you select BCD or “true” binary. Also, it throws in a “dim” switch in case the lights are too bright.